At karaoke a couple of Fridays ago I sang something I had never sung before, in a key I had no business attempting. It went fine. Not good. Fine.
The host, who calls everyone baby, told me it was the most committed bad decision he had seen all night. I took it as a compliment because it was one.
Here is why it worked. Nobody in that room had a previous version of me singing that song. There was no benchmark, so there was nothing to fall short of.
New jobs run on the same physics.
The first six months somewhere new are the only stretch of your career when you are paid to ask why, and the window closes whether or not you use it.
A friend started brand side last month and called me in a small panic because she felt like she was contributing nothing but questions. I told her the questions are the contribution, and that they have an expiration date.
Three things to do with the window. One, keep a running file of everything that confuses you in week one. The naming convention nobody can explain, the approval step nobody can justify, the deck template with a slide everyone skips. By month seven you will have stopped seeing all of it. That file is the most honest audit the company will get for years.
Two, ask the dumb question in the room, not in the hallway afterward. Newness is the only social license that lets you say I do not understand why we do this without it reading as an attack. Spend it. It does not roll over.
Three, notice what the company says about itself in week one against what it does in month three. Onboarding is a brand campaign aimed at exactly one person, and you are the only one who ever gets to fact-check it from both sides.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. The sharpest positioning insight I ever heard came from a strategist eleven days into the job, who asked why the client kept calling their customers members when nothing about the experience was a membership. Eleven days. She had not yet learned to stop noticing.
Onboarding is a brand campaign aimed at exactly one person, and you are the only one who ever gets to fact-check it from both sides.
I go back to that bar in two weeks. I will pick something I have never sung, do it badly, commit anyway, and it will be fine, because nobody in the room will have heard me try it yet. Enjoy that while it lasts. It applies in both places, and it runs out in both places too.